So. Much. Emphasis.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Pat in Richland, Michigan, which is near Kalamazoo.

Hiya, Pat.

Hi. Thank you for taking my call.

Sure. What’s up?

Well, I get regular emails from a website that’s called Head Butler, and it gives recommendations, mostly for books and music and that kind of thing. And recently they had a review of Carla Bruni’s new CD. She’s the first lady of France.

And the review said this: she’s got a cashmere voice and a killer body, plays decent guitar and writes her own lyrics, can hold her own with queens and statesmen. And then it says, she must be stopped, which is written with a period after each word.

And I’ve seen that before, using periods and capitalizing each word that way to emphasize the words. And it seems to me such a perfect way to transcribe that tone people take when they’re making a thread or some dire pronouncement or explaining something to a little child or a simpleton or something.

And to me it conveys a lot more than something like italics or all caps. And I think it’s just a fantastic use of punctuation, but I don’t remember seeing it until pretty recently, and I found it hard to search for online.

I was thinking maybe read my lips might have been written down that way, and I think that was from 1988, but I didn’t find any example of that. So can you tell me, does it go back farther than just a few years, and can you trace who invented it? Because that person’s a genius as far as I’m concerned.

Well, let’s talk about this a little bit. Most of the people that I know that have looked into this, and believe me, other people have looked into this phenomenon, trace it to a Simpsons episode from 1997.

Really?

That’s fantastic, they are geniuses.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is in this particular episode, which they named Worst Episode Ever. Comic book guy, if you remember, he’s this overweight guy wearing a t-shirt that usually has some kind of pop culture reference on it, and he’s a little bit supercilious and full of himself and thinks that he’s like the expert on all this pop culture that he consumes.

In this episode, he says that, he says worst episode ever in this particular comic book guy voice. He says something like worst episode ever like that.

Yes. I remember it very well.

And that episode is an in-joke made by the writers of The Simpsons to refer to their fans who online had gotten into the habit first of saying worst episode ever to about a variety of Simpsons episodes. And then it became kind of an in-joke for that group to every time a new episode of The Simpsons came out to say worst episode ever.

And so they’re kind of that comic book guy standing in for these fans, so they’re kind of poking back at the fans. I love it.

Yeah, after that episode then, Pat, what happened was the fans adopted it so much, and there are a lot of Simpsons fans. The show’s been on for, what, 16 years now, that they started using that everywhere, and it became worst whatever ever. You could put anything in the blank.

Worst book ever. Worst show ever. And they began to punctuate in such a way to indicate that kind of way that the comic book guy says it. And sometimes, in order to indicate how that last word is pronounced, they say, they spell it E-V-A-R.

Ever.

Ever.

Yeah, E-V-A-R instead of E-V-E-R.

It’s perfect, isn’t it, Pat?

It’s great.

That really is sheer genius, I think. But that particular writing style, to use punctuation to indicate that there’s something deliberate or forceful being said, has been traced back by the fans of the website Language Log to the 1950s at least.

So just to kind of recap here, the Simpsons are responsible probably, most likely, for the current wave of this. Because something can happen online that before we all were typing for a living. Let’s face it, everybody in our day jobs at home, we have computers. The penetration of computers is great. We all type a lot more. We all use text a lot more than we would have even 20 years ago.

And this kind of like little clever way to use language wouldn’t have traveled as far in the 1950s. So it kind of took some big pop culture thing like The Simpsons in order to make it happen.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that because I love that use, and it’s great to know whence it came.

Thank you for your sharp eye, Pat. Sometimes this stuff slips by, and not everyone catches it.

Well, it had slipped by me for several years, it seems. Thank you very, very much.

You’re welcome, Pat. Thanks for calling.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Grant?

Martha, did I say too much?

I thought that was the best answer ever.

Oh, you flatter me.

Do I get an award?

How about a pay raise?

No, that’s fantastic. Well, we’d love to take your calls about anything that you’ve seen that is curious and makes you wonder about its origins. By all means, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. Things that make you go, you can write us about those at words@waywordradio.org.